Laramie Lawrence
Honors: 300
Dr. Czarnecki
10-26-17
Laughter is often said to reduce stress and produce pain reliving hormones. It is the ‘fountain of youth’, the secret ingredient to longevity. A person who laughs all the time is, more often than not, healthier and happier than a person who rarely laughs at all. Laughter is known as a natural form of medicine. However, like many other things, some people take the laughter and the jokes too far. This is the case in the story, “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” by Sherman Alexie.
As the main character, Jimmy has spent his life “laughing to keep from crying,” and telling jokes to gain some illusion of control in bad situations. In a more subconscious, psychological way, Jimmy’s
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The historical allusions to baseball and Hank Aaron’s supplanting of Babe Ruth’s home-run record (with his 755 career home runs) raise issues about the racism that plays a low-key but omnipresent role in the rest of the story. When Aaron got too close to breaking Ruth’s record he received multiple letters containing death threats and a wish for him to be diagnosed with cancer and other horrendous …show more content…
Cancer, like humor, is an equal opportunity offender. And cancer has become almost like a national pastime, which is just another display of the brilliance of Sherman Alexie. You can’t go anywhere without running into multicolored ribbons and pricey paraphernalia commodifying death and infantilizing the very personal and agonizing fight to survive cancer. Everything put in place to raise awareness in order to find a cure has been done with the very best of intentions and the hope for a future without the dark, overhanging cloud that cancer brings to so many people’s lives. But that support ironically creates a sense of audience, of fandom and voyeurism, the ribbons becoming the admission tickets to the new national pastime. Cancer itself is like a bad joke that just won’t quit.
In “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” Alexie explores humor as a strategy for coping with tragedy. He shows both sides of using dark humor to get through difficult situations. In this work, the author suggests that humor can be a very effective weapon against despair but people need to be careful how they use it because too much dark humor can dehumanize the very individuals it is supposed to help. To me, it is this kind of dark humor that reminds us of who we are, how little we actually control, and why it all matters
As the story continues and McMurphy’s influence over the patients strengthens, the reader sees other occasions where the laughter is healing. With McMurphy’s big, boisterous laugh dominating the ward, the patients begin to laugh themselves. Their laughs sound awkward at first- forced, simulated- but nevertheless they are laughing and whether the patients, or Bromden realize it, this phony laugh does begin to heal them.
When a society replaces medicine for laughter, people are going to have problems just as the patients did in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. McMurphy, along with today's society, believes that laughter truly is the best medicine, and one cannot live a normal, sane life without it.
In the end, Norma comes back to Jimmy because the person she lives with is too serious. In “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore,” Victor and Adrian talk about the basketball stars on the reservation, hoping that someone on the reservation can resist alcohol and develop his or her basketball skills to be a successful ballplayer. The function of Alexie’s humor shifts throughout his stories. In “A Drug Called Tradition,” Alexie’s humor effectively accomplishes one of his goals by obliging readers to reconsider their concepts, while his humor helps his characters improve their situations in “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor.” In “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore,” humor mitigates the characters’ pain and despair.
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, humor is present in a very powerful form. Normally, insane people don’t have the capacity to laugh or find the humor in something as we "normal" people do. They live tragic existences, wandering day by day in the bland, depressing world of an asylum. They have forgotten how to live because they are under the authoritative rule of the head nurse, and under the behavioral influence of drug doses and bossy orderlies. The patients have no real existence of their own, and they are essentially lifeless. As the Lord works in mysterious ways, Randall MacMurphy is "sent" to heal the patients of the asylum. He shows them that to laugh is good, and laughing at yourself can sometimes be the best medicine. He is the comic healer who gives life to the otherwise hopeless patients of the asylum. MacMurphy seems to have an affinity for laughter. In essence, it is an escape for him- it makes him feel good, and most importantly, it radiates to his friends, and helps heal them.
Steve Almond’s “Funny is the New Deep” talks of the role that comedy has in our current society, and most certainly, it plays a huge role here. Namely, through what Almond [Aristotle?] calls the “comic impulse”, we as a people can speak of topics that would otherwise make many of uncomfortable. Almond deems the comic impulse as the most surefire way to keep heavy situations from becoming too foreboding. The comic impulse itself stems from our ability and unconscious need to defend and thus contend with the feeling of tragedy. As such, instead of rather forcing out humor, he implies that humor is something that is not consciously forced out from an author, but instead is more of a subconscious entity, coming out on its own. Almond emphasizes
Should a neglected, discriminated, and misplaced black man living in the mid 1900s possessing a spectacular, yet unfulfilled talent for baseball be satisfied or miserable? The play Fences, written by August Wilson, answers this question by depicting the challenging journey of the main character, Troy Maxon. Troy, an exceptional baseball player during his youth, cannot break the color barrier and is kept from playing in the big leagues. That being his major life setback, Troy has a pessimistic view on the world. His attitude is unpleasant, but not without justification. Troy has a right to be angry, but to whom he takes out his anger on is questionable. He regularly gets fed up with his sons, Lyons and Cory, for no good reason. Troy disapproves of Lyons’ musical goals and Cory’s football ambitions to the point where the reader can notice Troy’s illogical way of releasing his displeasures. Frank Rich’s 1985 review of Fences in the New York Times argues that Troy’s constant anger is not irrational, but expected. Although Troy’s antagonism in misdirected, Rich is correct when he observes that Troy’s endless anger is warranted because Troy experiences an extremely difficult life, facing racism, jail, and poverty.
On April 15th 1947, Jack Roosevelt Robinson played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Jackie, went without a hit in a game which would have been noted only in sports almanacs were it not for the color of his skin. At Ebbet's Field that day, Robinson broke baseball's “color barrier.” The integration of Black athletes into White mainstream sports had begun. Robinson endured a variety of slanderous yells, racial epithets and even hurled objects. The fact that African Americans would be discriminated against in sports was never more apparent. Today, that same vitriol manifests itself in various forms of discrimination. Rhetorical forms of discrimination are just as damaging today as outright bigotry was then. Though rhetorical racism is not as overt, it continually influences an audience that is largely unaware of its existence.
Although modern science has allowed us to develop many complex medicines, laughter is still the strongest one available in the real world and in the book. Laughter proves to be a strong medicine in more ways than one and is completely free, allowing anyone to use it at anytime. It allows us to connect socially with people, it can be used as a way of overthrowing power, and it is good for your health. As Randle McMurphy showed in the novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, laughter can lighten the mood in the darkest situations.
The spectrum of therapeutic techniques available within the health care continuum is very complex and varied. From traditional medicine, to holistic remedies, and anything in between, nurses have a rather large arsenal at their disposal when it comes to treating the patients that are under their care. Humor as an alternative therapy has long been understood as a proven means to aid in the recovery process. “With so much power to heal and renew, the ability to laugh easily and frequently is a tremendous resource for surmounting problems, enhancing your relationships, and supporting both physical and emotional health” (Smith & Segal, 2015). The purpose of this paper is to discuss situations in which humor would be a viable alternative therapy
Laughing is resorted to in times where we need to laugh. It’s an escape from reality, its comfort, its fear. Laughing subdues any emotion that is too high strung in our system. It lets it vapor out in a melancholy form that helps us cope with problems that no one else can really understand and help us with. In One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest it allowed emotional tension escape from the patients and made nurse Ratched lose her ward.
Isn’t it overwhelming to consider the fact that approximately one in eight deaths in the world are due to cancer? To make this more comprehensible, the number of deaths caused by cancer is greater than caused by AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. Along with the idea that this disease does not have a definite cure is a mind-staggering concept to grasp. If not caught in time, cancer means guaranteed death. These types of thoughts were floating around my head when my mother had told me that my father had mouth cancer.
Sean O’Casey once said that, “Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.” Without laughing, man is not living fully. For the men in the novel, One Who Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, they are in a mental institution and are repressed by their head nurse until a new patient, McMurphy, comes in laughing an changing the way everything is ran, turning the insane sane. In the novel, laughter is a symbol of sanity and it helps a person grow stronger, so when the men laugh they grow more confident and obtain the ability to overcome the Nurses’ power.
Richman, J. The lifesaving function of humor with the depressed and suicidal elderly. Gerontologist 35(2): 271 (1995).
Never forget to laugh. "If you can laugh at it, you can survive it" (Cosby). Life is difficult for everyone. It is how people deal with these strives and struggle is what matters. Sometimes, the best way to get a break from the hardships of life is to simply laugh with friends and family. It’s a Balance process. Some people can be caught up in life’s problems and forget to laugh. Laughter is the mental medicine for life. Laughter supports the health of the body. Laughter can break up the quietness in a room. Laughter can change the room from black and white to a rainbow of colors. Laughter is a result of looking at something in a positive light. Is the glass half empty or half full? Whatever the circumstance, never underestimate the power of a good giggle. Never forget to laugh.
If there is one way to bring a smile to someone’s face, it is laughter. Funny jokes, comical stunts, sarcasm- Every person is different when it comes to what makes them laugh. Some find dry humor comical. Others think sarcasm or joke-filled ranting are the best. ‘Comedy’ is such a broad term, broad enough to allow everyone to find something they find comical. In fact, ‘comedy’ includes a specific type of drama, one where the protagonist is joyful and happy endings are expected. Comedy is like a drug; it allows you to escape reality. When we say the word ‘comedy’ in the present, we are generally referring to a type of performance which provides humor. However, in its broadest sense, comedy has only one purpose: comedy makes people smile and